The contagion of composition

What is it that causes a person to write, to want to write, even to need to write? Lots of people never have the desire to write, indeed could pass their entire lives quite happily without ever having learned to write–yet others seem unable to prevent themselves from writing. (Although the number of compulsive writers seems quite the larger to me, I doubt my circle of acquaintances constitutes a statistically valid sampling of the population.)

The same questions have haunted neurologist Alice Flaherty, so she did something about it: she wrote a book, The Midnight Disease. (It seems she is in some part the subject of her own research.) I haven’t read the book yet because I just purchased it, but it’s on the top of my reading pile, which I’m sure has caused a great deal of grumbling among the other books whose patient queue has been jumped.

Maybe I’ll feed my own disease and write a review of the book when I finish it.